Pacific Standard March-April 2013 Cover

Where Have All the Protesters Gone?

An anti-war protest in New York City in 2004 (PHOTO: PENGUIN/SHUTTERSTOCK)

A couple of years ago at a trade show I met an Egyptian business executive. He had come to Barcelona directly from the Tahrir Square protests in Egypt, where he'd been brained by a rock thrown by pro-Mubarak supporters. He was a higher-up in a successful telecom company in Cairo—to look at him you'd imagine him to have been a beneficiary of a dictatorship more than a critic of it. And yet there he was, bandaged and bruised, a few stitches over his right eye. It was only a few days after Mubarak had fallen, and he was so excited he shared several hours of video he'd recorded on his cell phone ... Read More

Is America’s ‘Strategic Pivot’ Towards China Premature?

In the cover story of our inaugural issue back in April, we took note of the Obama administration's strategic pivot towards Asia and the commensurate shift away from our entanglements in the Middle East and South Asia. In a new essay in the Journal Society, the communitarian sociologist Amitai Etzioni takes a dim view of this strategic move: The shift reminds one of the old parable about a child who was looking for his lost dime next to the lamp post, not because it was there that the dime went missing—but because it was there that the light made searching easy. In Etzioni's view, ... Read More

Ultimate Weapon: Knowing a War Zone’s Culture

When U.S. soldiers first went into Afghanistan and Iraq a decade ago, the military gave little thought to how an understanding of regional language, values, and norms could ease the interaction between troops and the locals they encountered. “There was this early period there when we invaded Iraq, in particular, where we just thought that this was a military endeavor,” said Rochelle Davis, an assistant professor of anthropology at Georgetown University and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center. “If you go back and look at how we talked about it and the things we did, culture just ... Read More

No Way Out: Exiting Afghanistan and Iraq

On Oct. 7, 2001, U.S. forces launched an offensive in Afghanistan with the aim of dismantling the al-Qaeda terror network and driving the radical Islamist Taliban government from power. That was a decade ago, and the war goes on. Today, the U.S. finds itself facing a clear but intractable question: How do we end wars? As the “long wars” of Afghanistan and Iraq rumble on, the answer becomes more elusive and more vague. In an August 2010 speech, President Obama described how the world had entered a new era, “an age without surrender ceremonies.” Perhaps Obama remembered that ... Read More

War on Terror Promises Era of Persistent Conflict

This is the last of a three-part series looking at how the ... Read More

A Professional Military and the Privatization of Warfare

This is the second of a three-part series looking at how the ... Read More

America in the Hands of a Professional Military

This is the first of a three-part series looking at how the professionalization of the military has led to the privatization of warfare and an era of persistent conflict. Americans observe two anniversaries this year, neither one of them wanted. March marked eight years of combat in Iraq, and October, 10 years of fighting in Afghanistan. These are America's "long wars," a seemingly endless grind of combat. These long wars invite comparison, and some recall the eight years of U.S. war in Vietnam, but there is a more compelling distinction. It was a conscript Army that flew its Hueys over ... Read More

Greener Battlefields Would Be Safer for Troops

The experience of Lt. Gen. Richard Zilmer, who in 2006 became the commander of the coalition forces in the Al Anbar province of Iraq, exemplifies the changing strategy of fighting insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq. Before coming to Iraq, Zilmer focused on the importance of space-related warfighting technologies and capabilities. In Iraq, his concerns were often a little more down to earth — his command's dependence on oil. Seventy percent of all convoys carried liquid fossil fuels, and attacks on convoys, the general learned, account for about half of all the casualties. Generators ... Read More

Plucking Learning From the WikiDeluge

The Pentagon has been bracing all week for the next big release of WikiLeaks secrets, a haul expected to contain as many as 400,000 classified documents from the Iraq conflict that would dwarf this summer's Afghan "war logs." The Pentagon has a 120-person damage-control team at the ready, and it has already begun begging news outlets not to publish the material. (WikiLeaks, which runs better interference than the Pentagon itself, maintains on its Wikileaks Twitter feed that it has no idea why everyone thinks these files are about Iraq.) Whenever they are released — and whatever is ... Read More

Dead But Not Gone

The body count is a feature of modern war, born of the inconclusive fin de siècle insurgencies of the Philippines and South Africa. Then, and to an extent now, in Iraq and Afghanistan, inability to achieve warfare's traditional goals, like territory taken or field armies defeated, required governments to create a metric to show that troops weren't spinning their wheels. As we learned at Robert McNamara U, the bigger the bag, as they say in hunting, the better. But modern warfare also brings concern for, or at least lip service to, the fate of noncombatants, civilians hurt through ... Read More